Whether Art has anything to do with the production and acquisition of Knowledge (»Erkennntis« is the word) does not strike me as a very good question - for it will produce an infinity of answers all of which, to make things worse, will be acceptable. Each and every answer will depend, as always, on how you previously define »Kunst« and »Erkenntnis« - but as, in this specific case, the two concepts in question are huge (both in the sense of being charged with rich histories and of being very fuzzy) you might end up with an »anything goes« situation - which is the emblematic situation for what I call ‚the misery of constructivism«. Now while this (the »anything goes«) may be good enough for the genre of Festschrift, I thought that Siegfried deserved better. Better (in the sense of more interesting) is the question how one wants to have the relation between Art and (the production / acquisition of) Knowledge. This way, I admit, it turns into an inevitably personal question - and to answer it just for myself will not imply a quest for the world to agree with me. Why do I say, then, that the question is more interesting as a personal question? Who would care about how I want to have this relationship between Art and Knowledge? Well, first of all it turns out to be interesting to me because, believe it or not, as I am writing along I realize that I have never asked myself this question. Also (and as opposed to the initial, general question which would have entangled me in endless definitions and in an intellectual agenda of the ‚conditions of the possibility«-type), the personal question obliges me - more immediately at least than the general question - to talk about aesthetic experience »itself«.
Nevertheless, I need to make just one definitonal remark. Of course we can describe the meanings of »Erkenntnis« in a myriad ways - even something like »sensual experience« or »sense perception« may come to mind here. But I think such excentric meanings don't sound right in relation to the German word »Erkenntnis«. There are two elements, in a definition of »Erkenntnis«, on which I want to insist, and they both make the concept look quite un-fancy. Firstly, I think that whenever we use this word we think of a world-appropriation - or the illusion thereof - by concepts (or, at least, of a world capable of being transformed into concepts). Secondly, the word always seems to suggest that these concepts, that this knowledge is (or was once) new. If I now ask myself how I want the relation between »Kunst« and »Erkenntnis«, I will say (unsurprisingly, for Siegfried at least, I bet) that I hope that art can give me a break from Erkenntnis - so much so indeed that I am prepared to hail and celebrate as ‚art« whatever will give me such relief. For, seen from an individual angle, it is extremely difficult not to produce new concepts all the time. Interpreting the world conceptually, revising old interpretations, fine-tuning new ones - this, after all, is how we spend our lives (and this remains true even if hardly any of those individually new concepts that we produce will ever make it into a dictionary or, perhaps, into a written text). It goes without saying - for the following assumption belongs to the most standardized and most rancid discourse of western Humanism - that by constantly producing Erkenntnis in the form of new concepts, we constantly transform ourselves (which transformation at least we intellectuals are expected to cherish unconditionally). In contrast, what I so hope to get from art (or from whichever source), is to be quiet for a moment, to be without the need of producing new concepts all the time and of transforming myself yet again. The great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca seems to speak about this very desire - with considerable irony for the opposite desire - in his poem »Muerte« (»Death«) from »Poeta en Nueva York«:
How hard they try!
How hard the horse tries
to become a dog!
How hard the dog tries to become a swallow!
[...]
And I, on the roof's edge,
what a burning angel I look for and am!
But the plaster arch,
how vast, how invisible, how minute,
without even trying.
So what I am talking about is (in Lorca's words) how much I envy the plaster arch. But do I have to die, as the title of that poem seems to suggest, in order to quit producing Erkenntnis and in order to quit transforming myself?
This question gets us straight into Heidegger's philosophy. Not primarily, however, into his reflection on death but into the concept of composure (»Gelassenheit«) - which for Heidegger was the right attitude of being-in-the-world, an attitude also that was thought to be capable of overcoming the everyday epistemology of the »Subject« (to which he usually refers under the name of »metaphysics«). In order to make a potentially long story extremely short, let me say that Heidegger seems to associate with the concepts of the »Subject« and of »metaphysics« everything that I am longing for art to redeem me of. Being excentric in relation to the world of objects, the Subject constantly »makes sense« of the world (the word »metaphysics« referring here to the double-layeredness of a world whose surfaces offer themselves as signifiers to be read for underlying meanings). The subject , thus, constantly produces Erkenntnis - with the ultimate goal of transforming the world. What the subject is incapable of is to let be - and this is the (surprisingly simple) reason why the notion of Gelassenheit has absorbed, within Heidegger's philosophy, most of the energy that pushes him towards building an everyday epistemology that would be an alternative to metaphysics. Gelassenheit, composure is a prerequisit (not a guarantee) for not interpreting and for not transforming the world - in positive terms: Gelassenheit is a prerequisit for letting happen the unconcealment of Being.
Now I know that Siegfried will ask me (tongue-in-cheek) what the »unconcealment of Being« may possibly be. The - again - surprisingly simple answer is that Being means the world without interpretations, without meanings, without dividing lines, a state of simultaneity so absolute that it even includes the simultaneity, the non-distinction of things being present and things being absent. As Heidegger once put it, Being is the sphere »die alles zueinander versammelt und zu sich selbst in das eigene Beruhen im Selben zurueckkehren läßt«. If we could ever »see« Being, i.e. if we could ever see the world without interpretations, meanings, dividing lines (but we can't), we would become part of it - and we would then become be indeed as quiet and composed as the plaster arch in García Lorca's poem. Unfortunately (as far as I am concerned) this will never happen, as we cannot really quit making sense. But how close to an experience of Being can we come - and under which conditions? Of course, »to experience Being«, under Heideggerean premises, is a paradox. For making experience always means to be concept-based in relation to the world - so that Being, as the absence of concepts, is impossible to experience (I am referring here, by the way, to Peter Fuchs' lucid description of the core situation of Zen Buddhism). Is there any solution - or are we trapped into this paradox? The solution, the answer to the question how it may be possible not to produce Erkenntnis in one's relation to the world, may lie in Heidegger's conception of the aesthetic. »Beautiful« for Heidegger is not just Being unconcealed - it is the process, the movement of this unconcealment. Why is this so? Being (or nothingness - in claiming this synonymity I am quoting Heidegger), Being as the non-distinct cannot enter the conceptual sphere of our human experience. But art, Heidegger suggests, can sometimes present to us (make present for us) the lightning-short moments of Being's entry / transition into the sphere of our experience and meaning. These are the moments in which, out of nothingness, Being transforms itself into being (Seiendes) by adopting a shape and by adopting a substance (i.e. by leaving behind itself the non-distinctness of the present and the absent). But the movement of emergence that I am invoking here along Heidegger's lines, is always accompanied by a simultaneous movement of withdrawal - a movement of withdrawal that has to happen because, if Being ever came completely into the zone of our experience, it would have lost itself.
Do I believe any of this? Will this lead to an adequate - or only: to an intellectually appealing - definition of art? I don't know - nor do I really care. All I can say is that I recently (in Japan) encountered art forms that seem to lend themselves to an association with the concepts that we used in order to describe the »unconcealment of Being«. These are art forms which made me feel that, while exposed to them, I got a glimpse of Gelassenheit by getting a break from producing Erkenntnis. In No and Kabuki, the two forms of classical Japanese theater, all the actors come to the stage and leave the stage over a bridge that leads through the audience (the best seats are considered to be those close to the middle of the bridge). Now, this emerging and vanishing of the theatrical personae (especially I think in those plays that feature demons) often takes up more time than the actual scene and interaction in which an actor participates on the stage. Synchronized, in No-theater, with the (for our ears) monotonous beat of two types of archaic drums, the actors' bodies seem to gain form and presence as they are coming forth from under a curtain - and approach the stage; and they seem to undo this presence and this form when they are vanishing. No pieces are breathtakingly slow and repetetive. But if you overcome the first impulse as a western spectator, i.e. the first desire to leave the theater at the earliest opportunity, if you have the patience to let the slowness of the emerging and vanishing grow on you, then No, after three or four hours, will make you think that your relation to the world has changed. You may feel how you begin to let things come, how you cease to ask what they mean, and that, while you learn how to let things come, you become part of them.
The demons who take so long to get to the No stage may well stand for non-distinctness. Once they reach the stage, they can become all kinds of human bodies and human roles - but when they are supposed to be »just demons« they reject such forms: then their hair is wild and exuberant and while the rhythm of their movements is hard to get into, their eyes are neither closed nor open, and their tongues are sticking out. Is this the quieting face of Being?